Minimizing the Age of Information Over an Erasure Channel for Random Packet Arrivals With a Storage Option at the Transmitter

We consider a time slotted communication system consisting of a base station (BS) and a user. At each time slot an update packet arrives at the BS with probability p, and the BS successfully transmits the update packet with probability q over an erasure channel. We assume that the BS has a unit size buffer where it can store an update packet upon paying a storage cost c. There is a trade-off between the age of information and the storage cost. We formulate this trade-off as a Markov decision process and find an optimal switching type storage policy.